Surfacing Momentarily.

Well, I made it through our recent regional vocal, choral and dance festivals in one piece (and very happily, as the performances were, as always, absolutely stellar), only to be broadsided by a completely unexpected situation regarding parental displeasure as to some adjudicators’ decisions.

It’s boiled over and become nasty enough for me to be seriously considered packing my directorship bags and quietly leaving the building, as it were. Having given many years of invisible and earnest backstage support to this community project, I can quite proudly say that I am leaving things in better shape than when I first became involved as part of an ad hoc “rescue committee” when the previous executive walked away en masse, but I now have a first-hand appreciation of why they did so.

Some folks thrive on high emotion and created drama; I am not one of them. I yearn to come peacefully back to the books, my only Big Important Decisions being whether to next read a Wharton, a Whipple or a Pym.

I’ve managed to read some interesting things in the brief moments of downtime I’ve snatched from the fray this past week; a book post will be coming shortly.

I’ve recently read about an young Englishwoman making a solo horseback journey across Canada in the first years of World War II, and discovered diverting modern(ish) novels by A.N. Wilson and W.D. Valgardson, just to mention a few. I do so want to talk about these, and some others, but it will have to wait until another day. (Is that the phone I hear ringing? Deep breath, and back into the fray!)

Saddlebags for Suitcases is right in front of me – review in progress!

Regarding the other thing, I’ve been boosted up by fellow local committee members and by an encouraging conversation with the provincial festival’s CEO, and am encouraged by their words of sympathy and support. Apparently in the great scheme of things our situation is very small-scale. But ugly and unnecessary, and I am finding it very stressful, especially as it was so unexpected. Had walked out of the theatre Sunday night thinking, “Well, that went really well!”

Ha! I reckoned without the “Mama Bear” effect, apparently. In a nutshell, we have been asked, with great passion, to take adjudicator-decided awards away from two children and give them to two others. Letters have been written and sent by the offended parents, and a grievance procedure started against the board of the festival. Having a hard time getting my head around this, that it was even asked of us. There is, of course, only one possible outcome – a resounding No! to the offended parties, but there will be social repercussions – everyone knows everyone in this tight little world, and the rumor mill is already churning out fantastical I-said-he-said-she-said-they-said embellishments.

Yikes! So sorry you’re dealing with ridiculous drama. I hope that the people creating the fuss will find something else to occupy them before too long, so that you can carry on as you have been, without the stress.

I am trying to let it go, though I’m still reeling from the shock to some extent – the situation materialized completely out of the blue!!! The formal complaint is actually a good thing, I think, as it takes any further response out of my hands and gives it to the whole of our organizing committee. Other than this, the first part of our festival was quite lovely, and I am looking forward (cautiously!) to the Piano, Speech and Dramatic Arts disciplines which are set to go in a few weeks. I love these regional performing arts festivals of which there are over twenty in our province; my dancer daughter joyfully performed at several of them for something like 13 years, and I am so happy to be able to “give back” to allow other young people a venue to perform in in front of adjudicators and full audiences. Does that sound impossibly upbeat and goody-two-shoes? It’s the honest truth, and the same can be said for every one of our current organizing committee. It feels such a positive thing to be involved in – incidents such as this stage parent drama are thankfully exceedingly rare. But as our only reward for literally hundreds of hours of “donated” work each year is the feel-good feeling we get, this kind of thing is mightily discouraging. 😦

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Rudbeckia in September.

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These “Reviews” and Ratings

I am merely a reader, a consumer of books for amusement and personal instruction, not a professional reviewer - and that is indeed a worthy profession, an important literary craft - so these posts are merely meant to be one person's reading responses, not scholarly reviews.

Early on in this blog I began rating the books I talked about on a 1 to 10 scale; it was meant to be a quick way to communicate my personal degree of satisfaction/pleasure (or the opposite) in each reading experience.

To emphasize: These are very personal, completely arbitrary ratings. These are merely meant to be a measure of the book's success in meeting my hopes and expectations as a reader.

5 & higher are what I consider as "keepers", in various degrees. A 10 indicates that I can think of no possible improvement. Ratings under 5 are rare & I struggle with giving those, but in all honesty sometimes feel them appropriate for, again, undeniably arbitrary and very personal reasons.

Each book is rated in its own context, NOT in comparison to the entire range of literature, which would, of course, be an impossible task.